THE IMAGE OF ARTHUR has haunted the poets and writers of western Europe for nearly nine centuries, and there is no sign of an end to the reign of the ‘once and future king’ in the world of literature. The Arthurian epic is as popular a subject now as it was when it was first fashioned, and the stories about Arthur and the heroes associated with him come in a bewildering number of guises. There has never been just one authentic version of his deeds, and new Arthurs are still being created apace. All this springs from a figure so obscure that we cannot even be sure that he existed, a shadow of a shadow in the fragments of history and poetry that survive from sixth-century Wales. His deeds have often, if not always, been those of other men; even the twelve great battles which the Welsh chronicler Nennius tells us about in the eighth century may be those involving other leaders, and his last victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon, centre of so much speculation and invention, is not attributed to him in the one contemporary record of it. What inspired the Welsh poets, however, was not the hero himself, whoever he may have been, but an idea, an idea which was a rallying-call to a people in retreat, driven by the Saxons into the western extremities of the land that had once been theirs: ‘Their land they shall lose, except wild Wales.’ Arthur, who had once held the Saxons at bay, would return to conquer them.

And, in a manner of speaking, he has done so. Later medieval stories about him make him emperor of much of Europe; and his story was called ‘the matter of Britain’. The other great ‘matters’ which medieval poets celebrated were those of Troy and France, tales now long forgotten or best known in other, older versions. Arthur came to play a leading part in the literature of France and Germany, and later of England, conquering minds and imaginations if not bodies and lands. It is he, obscure and perhaps fictional, who is the archetypal medieval heroic figure, not the real and imperial Charlemagne, around whom the matter of France revolved.